Thursday, November 30, 2006 Wenceslao: Soaring summit expenses By Bong Wenceslao Candid Thoughts
HOW much should a host spend for a four-day activity, like an international gathering? If you have money, outer space should be the limit. If you are cash-strapped? Spend within your means. Or weigh the cash outflow against the potential gain of the activity. That, I would say, should have been the rule in our hosting of the Asean summit.
Now I have my worries, because national and concerned local governments are acting like they have all the money in the world to spend for the summit.
Note that Cebu City has gone beyond the P20 million it got as host of the foreign media. I shudder to think how much Malacañang and the other Metro Cebu cities are spending.
And for what? As a Sun.Star editorial noted earlier, this is but a four-day gathering. Viewed in a wider perspective, that is fleeting. After the last garbage has been swept away from the Cebu International Convention Center and the Shangri-La hotel, many people will have forgotten the summit. Is the spending justified?
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All the talk about the Asean summit has buried one important point: Christmas is just around the bend. Actually, the family decorated the house some three weeks back, or days after All Saints Day and All Souls Day. It was but a matter of pulling out of the storeroom the Christmas tree, series lights, etc. from last year and buying new items.
I actually call this our China ritual, because most of the materials we are using are cheap made-in-that-country items.
Consider: I went to a store looking for replacement bulbs for my series lights and the sales attendant merely told me to discard altogether the old lights and buy new ones. “Naay daghang barato nga series sir, tag-tulo P100 ra,” he said.
It dawned on me how dependent people like us have become to cheap imitation items. This may in the end be bad for our economy. But when you decorate your house for the yuletide season and your pocket is shallow, you don’t think about balance of payments or gross domestic products. So you end up having a “China” Christmas.
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It has been almost two weeks since my second son, Eldrick Khan, was born.
Unlike in the case of our first son, Edison Khan, we no longer find it difficult to care for Rick-rick. My wife Edizza is already a veteran, sort of, of the ritual.
Now Eldrick is no longer just a sleeping bundle, he is starting to provide daily joys to our home.
This was my wife’s second caesarian operation, and the decision to “package” the pregnancy was apparently a good one. The burden of paying the hospital bills was lightened. In this sense, I would like to thank concerned personnel of the Cebu Doctors Hospital for the safe delivery and the adequate medical attention given to my wife.
Of course, there is the ambivalent feeling, considering the kind of economic setup this country is in. There are always worries about raising another child.
But I am a believer in the saying that God will provide. My mother Juling and my late father Tiyong raised nine children and they did well. They are good role models.
